For those who haven’t played many video games, watching Video Games Live: Level 2 (2010) will be like crashing a party where they don’t recognize anyone. But it will be easy to identify with the hollers in the audience as the music to which fans have slain foes, embarked on quests and scaled fortress walls is brought to thundering life by the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra.
Just as the themes from TV shows like Seinfeld and The Brady Bunch can bring a fond mist to some eyes, so the crowd for this New Orleans taping went wild for the music associated with Halo, World of Warcraft, The Legend of Zelda and – even novices may know this early champion – Tetris. A choral treatment of the two-note musical sting for the brand Sega drove the folks wild.
The Video Games Live concert series began in 2005 and continues to tour; 16 Canadian dates are scheduled for next spring. While local orchestras play excerpts from an ever-changing roster of video-game scores, synchronized clips from the games appear on screens above their heads. A CD of an earlier round of music was released in 2008 (hence the “Level Two” in the title of this week’s 100-minute DVD and a related 75-minute CD), and the New Orleans gig was filmed last spring for a 90-minute PBS special.
Composer Tommy Tallarico, who created the show and plays guitar onstage wearing an orgasmic grimace (“That’s embarrassing,” he admits in a commentary), says his goal was respect for the craft. “When I got into this industry, we were dealing with bleeps and bloops. ... I wanted to prove to the world how culturally significant and artistic video games have become.”
Jack Wall, who conducted the orchestra for the show, says it was important to include quieter passages to avoid “big bombastic scores for 21/2 hours.” Yet it’s hard to get away from the long crescendos and stirring climaxes, as an onstage choir, mighty horn and string sections and masters of cymbals and kettledrums punch the elements home. Many of the composers here have clearly listened to Carl Orff’s crowd-pleasing Carmina Burana, although Christopher Tin’s music for Civilization IV has (in Tallarico’s words) “a Lion King kind of vibe.”
The show is as much an event as a concert. A young guy is invited onstage to rack up 200,000 points on the game Guitar Hero while Tallarico plays Aerosmith’s Sweet Emotion on a real guitar. The cocky teen asks that the level of difficulty be raised to “expert” from “hard.” Video-game pioneer Ralph Baer, now in his 80s, is invited onstage and receives a five-minute standing ovation (abbreviated for the DVD).
If there’s a problem with the film, it’s that the camera focuses too much on the orchestra and too little on the unfolding images. A split screen would have worked wonders. Those seeking an after-show mint can turn to an uninterrupted music video of the bubblegum-catchy, pun-heavy LeetStreet Boys song Yuri the Only One for Me. “Like a Pokemon, I Pikachu/ Like Mario and Peach I’m never reaching you.” Like Tetris, it stands up to repeat plays.
ALSO RELEASED THIS WEEK
Agora (2009)
Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar (The Others, The Sea Inside) set out to “make a movie about the cosmos, and I ended up making a movie about the Roman Empire in Egypt.” The link is Hypatia (Rachel Weisz), a philosopher in Alexandria in the late 300s who is said to have made calculations about the heavens that others wouldn’t make until centuries later. The alternately violent and talkative 126-minute epic is extraordinary in its imagining of how Alexandria looked and felt. The Christians are the bad guys, laying waste to the city’s repositories of learning and, history records, to Hypatia herself. Unlike Spain, where a Blu-ray version comes with a commentary by Amenabar, Canada gets a DVD with a breezy 50-minute documentary on Alexandria.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1974)
Oh, this is fun. Everyone’s favourite unapologetically lewd midnight-madness film comes to Blu-ray with nifty bonuses. If you like, an onscreen prompt will tell you what catchphrases to yell at the screen (“Not the Zen room!”). You can watch the movie in black and white until, like The Wizard of Oz, it bursts into colour halfway through The Time Warp (“It’s just a jump to the left”). You can trigger a picture-in-picture feature in which fans dress up as the characters and, with astonishing accuracy, mimic the entire film on stage. It’s every Frank-N-Furter wannabe’s dream come true.
Seven Samurai (1954)
Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese classic is long – 3 hours, 27 minutes – but he knows what he’s doing every step of the way. Farmers oppressed by bandits in the 1500s hire samurai to protect them. By the end, you’ll know and feel for every one of them. The film, remade as The Magnificent Seven, arrives on Criterion Blu-ray with the same bonuses as the 2006 DVD, including tales of how risky it is to act in the doorway of a burning building.
